The Case for the Starbucksification of Public Education

Traveling yesterday, so I'm late to comment on the page one Post piece about KIPP expansion. As KIPP continues to grow in size and prominence, some interesting things are becoming apparent. While KIPP is a reform model, it's also a brand, one that is being franchised around the country. Talking about brands and franchises in the context of public education tends to make people nervous, and often leads them to say things like "We don't want the equivalent of Starbucks for public education."

I, on the other hand, think it would be great if we Starbucksified the public schools.

I’ve said this around the Education Sector offices on more than one occasion, and the reaction has always been silence and arched eyebrows, the kind of look people use to signal that they are waiting for you to say you’re kidding.

Of course, most of the eyebrow-raisers drink coffee and thus go to Starbucks on a regular, sometimes daily basis. That’s because our offices are located on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, DC, where there is—literally—a Starbucks every block for as far as the eye can see. (When I was a kid I used to hike the Appalachian Trail with my father. The AT is marked with white blazes, and the idea is that when you stand next to a blaze, you can always look ahead to see the next one. I’m pretty sure DC Starbucks deployment works the same way.)

While I am also a Starbucks drinker, if I had my druthers I would buy my afternoon cappuccino from a quirky, independently owned coffee shop where they roast their ethically purchased beans themselves and the barista is always that cute girl with the short hair that you suspect / hope plays bass in a great indie rock band on weekends.

But I don’t have that choice, and never will. Only an organization with the money, discipline, and will-to-power of a giant corporation like Starbucks can manage to make high-quality coffee drinks unavoidable to a point that borders on the absurd. That inevitably involves certain compromises, both in terms of the quality of the coffee and the general sense of corporate sameness that degrades our quality of life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

That said, the ultimate effect of Starbucks' world domination has been a huge net increase in the quality of coffee, distributed broadly among the populace. This is true both because of the growth of Starbucks itself, and because of the competitive response: other franchises like Caribou Coffee (which I prefer, in only because they call their medium-sized coffee "medium," not "grande") have sprung into action, and everyone from McDonald's to Dunkin Donuts has upgraded coffee quality. While Starbucks might have run some locals out of business in a few coastal, blue-state enclaves, in most places it just means that you can buy good coffee that you could never buy before. The people who want Starbucks the most are often the farthest from centers of money and culture, and that distance is precisely the reason. Getting a Starbucks signifies that a place is Starbucks-worthy.

I'd like the same thing to happen to public education. A lot of local, independently-run schools aren't the equivalent of the cool coffee shop with the bass-playing barista. They're more like a mom & pop store with two pots of coffee on the back counter, decaf in the one with the orange rim. Starbucks—corporate sameness and all—could be a whole lot better.

Andy Rotherham correctly notes that KIPP isn't for everyone, and it might be reasonable to think that no organization, no matter how great, could successfully franchise more than, say, 2,000 schools. Maybe more, maybe less, nobody really knows at this very early point in the expansion of public school choice and non-governmental organizations running schools. But if one organization could run 2,000 really good schools, there's no reason that 10 or 15 couldn't do the same, each with a specific model tailored to a specific problem or population of students. That would be 30,000 schools, one-third of the 90,000 nationwide. Taking into account the additional benefits of competitive response, that would be a whole lot of progress.

In the end, much of the argument against Starbucks is aesthetic and—let's be honest—fairly elitist. The argument for Starbucks is utilitarian, and utilitarian values deserve a great deal of deference when it comes to matters of education policy. If every student deserves a high-quality education, then a policy or course of events that results in a large net increase in student learning sets a very high bar to dispute. Particularly if the people who would happily take a cup of high-quality soulless corporate coffee are drinking a much weaker brew today.